You don’t have to have blond hair to pay tribute to the Vikings. Whether your ancestors were born in Europe or elsewhere, you can, at your level, honour 3 essential qualities of the Northmen, but also of all peoples who have managed to preserve their original identity. You can, as much as you are, make live daily 3 values which will help you to connect with the spirit of your distant ancestors. Let us see what these values are.
Courage
Courage is an essential virtue for all those who seek to keep their identity intact. You have the opportunity every morning to embody courage by standing up in some way to someone who wants to impose their will on you. Courage often comes down to saying “no”. Develop your will and courage through daily practice that exposes you to some form of “risk”. Cultivate physical and intellectual courage, the two are intimately linked. Physical courage without intellectual courage will make you a bully, while intellectual courage without physical courage will make you at best a smooth talker. Physical courage is a metaphor for intellectual courage: your body can be used to oppose any other force (martial arts, weight training etc.). From these repeated contacts you can develop your musculature, your skill and your endurance. The same goes for intellectual courage, which is to oppose the will of others with your own will and a sense of justice. The more you are able to repeat these acts of courage in your daily life, the more you will be led to make courage your second nature.
The search for justice
The spirit of justice is the main motivation for what is called intellectual courage. To know what is right and not act on it is to lack courage. In essence, courage is about following what is right within ourselves.
Resist
Resisting domination can take many forms. It does not consist exclusively in showing panache or ardour, no, it can be more discreet, more profound. Resisting is sometimes just a matter of educating yourself, learning, transforming yourself from within. Since we are submerged in a mass culture that we did not really choose, the greatest pillar of resistance to the standardisation of cultures is to keep the invisible thread that connects us to our distant forebears. Globalisation is both an economic and a cultural project. Opposing this tidal wave on our own scale requires us to seek out sources that are different from, or even deviate from, the official discourse. It also means sharpening one’s critical mind by voluntarily deciding to refuse to drink from the mainstream media, whose primary purpose is to standardize us.
The first act of resistance is to reconnect to one’s source by ancestral means. In order to be resilient in the face of attempts to standardize us, you have to be able to become a full pitcher because nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t cultivate and adopt a set of values that you have patiently nurtured in your heart and mind, you will fall prey to a disembodied, mass culture that is only there to make you forget where you came from and who you could have become. Be patient and dark, sometimes the greatest battles are those fought in the silence of a bookshop. If you have the stamina to shape your character, your heart and your mind, you can withstand the future onslaught of modernity, which will fail to make you a clone of a disparate and incoherent culture. Resist as much as you can, seek the truth as your ancestors did from druids and other enlightened men and women, but above all, do not be passive. A ship that does not actively maintain a course will drift and sooner or later sink.
Passing on
Just as we are responsible for our own learning and education, we have an equal responsibility to pass on what we have discovered to the next generation and those around us. Knowledge, like happiness, does not diminish when shared. The family and tribal ties that bound pagan civilisations together were intended to perpetuate ancestral rites and knowledge. This is why the family is the crucible for the maintenance of ancestral traditions, a fortiori Vikings. The school, which had the effect of loosening this chain of transmission in order to impose ideas and a particular vision of the world, was therefore essentially built in opposition to family values. Where before people learned a trade and a skill in the family (hence the names of trades such as Lefèvre – blacksmith -, Baker or even Carpenter), the school’s ambition was to train workers. Skilled craftsmen became workers whose skills were less valued because they were specialised and therefore easily replaceable. In the cult of family values, materialised by the foundation of a family, there is therefore a desire to oppose the inexorable march that crushes people in order to individualise them. An individual – even if he or she is the paragon of freedom they try to sell us – will always be more fragile than a clan or a family. If you are individualised, you are isolated, vulnerable, like when an enemy army tries to separate the members of a regiment in order to swoop down on them like lions swooping down on a lone buffalo. Create family ties, tribal ties, a clan in short. If you don’t, you’ll cling to fantasies like making the company you work for your own family. Some bosses understand this, they know that our clan instincts go back to time immemorial, they will try to make their logo or their business name, the coat of arms for which you will take a solemn oath. Don’t be fooled, don’t fall into the trap, your family is at home and you have to build it. It will never be in an office cubicle without windows or warm colours.
